T. Boyle - The Inner Circle

Knowing this — uncovering it in the way an Egyptologist might have decrypted the hieroglyphs telling of the life and habits of some ancient pharaoh — gave me a strange rush of sensation. On the one hand, I couldn’t help thinking of my mentor as somewhat diminished — here he was preaching sexual liberation, at least privately — and he’d been as much a prisoner of antiquated mores, of shyness, ignorance and his own inability to act, as I was. And yet, on the other, his history gave me hope and a kind of eerie confidence that my own sexual confusion would eventually resolve itself.

There was more. His H-history, which began with adolescent alliances, as mine had, became increasingly complex. The zoology professor, the distinguished scientist with a star beside his name in American Men of Science, the middle-aged father of three and happily married entomologist with the no-nonsense manner, was moving higher up the 0–6 scale, having initiated relations with several of his graduate students in the course of their long field trips and ultimately experiencing an intense and very close relationship with a male student not much older than I. And how do you suppose that made me feel? And Mac, what of her?

My blood was racing and I suppose if anyone had looked in on me in the office that day they would have seen the color in my face. I riffled through the pages, all greedy eyes and trembling fingers, then slipped Prok’s folder back into the cabinet and took up Mac’s. Her history was more extensive than I would have guessed, and as the symbols gave themselves up to me I couldn’t help picturing her naked, her hands, her lips, the way she walked, the cloying catch in her voice. I was aroused, I admit it, and I was already up from the desk and searching through the files for Laura Feeney’s history, for Paul’s and the Kinseys’ children’s, when I caught myself. What was I doing? This was voyeuristic, it was wrong, a violation of the trust Prok had invested in me, and here I was throwing it all over just to satisfy the tawdriest kind of curiosity. Suddenly — it was dark now, the lamps softly glowing, the galls shadowy and surreal — I felt ashamed, as deeply ashamed as I’d ever felt in my life. I could barely breathe until I’d put the files back and replaced the code under lock and key in the drawer, all the while listening for footsteps in the hall. I switched off the lights. Locked up. And when I slunk off into the corridor, I turned up my collar and averted my face like a criminal.

The next day Prok was back, a volcano of energy, whistling a Hugo Wolf song under his breath, bustling about the office in a running pantomime of quick, jerky movements, up from his desk and back again, a glance into one of the Schmitt boxes, then the files, a cursory check of a two-years’-dormant gall that had suddenly begun to hatch out and then a shout from the microscope—“A new genus, here, Milk, I believe, a new genus altogether!” When I’d first come in he gave me half a moment to settle myself and then, with a grin, he laid a compact folder on my desk. “Eighteen histories,” he said, showing his teeth. “And thirty-six more promised. I was up till two in the morning just to record them.”

“Wonderful news,” I said, sharing the grin with him.

“Any difficulties while I was away?”

I fought to keep my face straight. Don’t shift your eyes, I told myself, don’t. “No,” I said, shifting my eyes, “no, everything was fine.”

He was looking at me curiously. I opened the folder in the hope of distracting him, but it didn’t work. Actually, I don’t think there was ever a person born on this earth more attuned to the nuances of human behavior than Prok, no one more sensitive to facial expression and what we’ve come to call body language — he was a bloodhound of the emotions, and he never missed a thing. “Everything?” he prodded.

I wanted to confess in that moment, but I didn’t. I murmured something in the affirmative, and, further to distract him, said, “Do you want me to transcribe these right away?”

He seemed absent, and didn’t answer immediately. He was always young-looking for his age — in those days people routinely took him for five to ten years younger than he actually was — but I saw the lines in his face then, the first faint tracings of the finished composition he would take to his grave with him. But he must be exhausted, I thought, pushing himself to collect his histories, driving all that way in his rattling old Nash, up late, up early, nobody to help him. “You know,” he said after a moment, and it was almost as if he were reading my mind, “I’ve been thinking how convenient it would be — how essential — for me to train another interviewer, someone I could trust to collect the data along with me, a person who might not necessarily have any scientific training but who could immerse himself in the technique I’ve developed and apply it rigorously. A quick study, John. Somebody like you.” A pause. “What do you say?”

I was so taken by surprise — and so consumed with guilt over my invasion of the files — that I fumbled this one badly. “I — well, of course,” I began. “Well, certainly, you know, I would — and I do have to graduate yet …”

“English,” he said, and the noun came off his tongue like something distasteful, something chewed over and spat out again. “I never quite understood the application of that — as a field, that is.”

“I don’t know.” I shrugged. He was watching me still, watching me with a preternatural intentness. “I thought I might like to maybe teach. Someday, I mean.”

He sighed. For all his qualities, patience wasn’t one of them. Nor did he take disappointment well. “Just think about it, John, that’s all I ask. No need to decide right this minute — let’s talk over dinner, and we are expecting you tonight, six sharp, that is, unless you have other plans?”

“Sex research? Are you nuts?”

Paul was stretched across his bed as if he’d been washed up there by a tide just recently receded. He was chewing gum and idly bouncing a tennis ball up off the racquet propped on his chest. Half a dozen books were scattered across the floor, face-down, another kind of flotsam. I didn’t feel like explaining it to him — he wouldn’t have understood anyway.

“At least it’s a job,” I said, pulling the sweater up over my head as carefully as I could so as not to disarrange my hair. I was changing for the Kinseys (they didn’t stand on ceremony, as Mac had said — behind closed doors they were even what might have been considered bohemian — but I felt that a dinner invitation, no matter how frequent or informal, required a jacket and tie, and I still feel that way).

Paul let the ball dribble off the racquet and fall to the floor, where it took three or four reduced hops and disappeared under my desk. “But the sort of questions he asks — it’s embarrassing. You’re not going to—?” he caught himself, then saw it in my face. “You are, aren’t you?”

I was knotting my tie in the mirror, studying my eyes, the way the hair clung slick to the sides of my head. “You didn’t seem to have any objections at the time, if I recall — you said, in fact, that you found the experience unique. Wasn’t that the word you used, ‘unique’?”

“Look, John, I might be all wet about this, but don’t you think it takes kind of an unusual sort of person to be poking into people’s dirty underwear all the time?”

I gave him a look that projected from the mirror all the way across the room, and there he was, diminished on the bed, diminished and growing smaller by the moment. I didn’t say anything.

“I wouldn’t want to call the professor an odd duck or a pervert or anything, but don’t you realize everyone’s going to think of you that way? And what about your mother? You think she’s going to approve — as a career choice, I mean?”